CSI Episode # 904 “Let it Bleed”

For a more com­plete episode review, please visit here.

It’s the annual Halloween episode, but this time things aren’t crazy-silly. Grissom and team inves­ti­gate a pair of dead bod­ies dis­cov­ered in a trash dump­ster. The first body is found by Stokes while he is chas­ing an armed rob­bery sus­pect, who fatally falls to his death into a dump­ster. While remov­ing the assailant’s body, the team dis­cov­ers a sec­ond body of a younger girl. The girl is dressed to impress, and the pos­si­bil­ity of her being a work­ing girl is briefly enter­tained — just long enough for a bad intro­duc­tion joke — “Trick or Treat.”

Forensic points of inter­est in this episode:

Brass using an ALS (Alternative Light Source)

Latent Print match through photo-stiching

Fish scale located on recov­ered handbag

Atropine found in the girl’s nasal cavity

Mixture of dif­fer­ent blood types found in dead girl

The first body (the armed rob­ber) is dressed in a police officer’s uni­form. The ques­tion is if it is a real uni­form, or a fake. It’s actu­ally Brass who grabs the ALS, or FLS (Forensic Light Source) depend­ing on your pref­er­ence, and notices traces of pen marks right above the breast pocket. This indi­cates to Brass that it is in fact a real police officer’s uni­form, as opposed to a Halloween cos­tume that just really looks good.

Fingerprints found at the scene were a series of par­tials, unus­able for com­par­i­son pur­poses, or data­base search­ing. The CSIs sim­ply took pho­tographs of the par­tials, and then used an auto­matic photo-stiching pro­gram to recon­struct the fin­ger­print, and then run the print through a data­base. Of course we all know such a com­puter pro­gram doesn’t exist. Imagine how expen­sive it would be to write, and the incred­i­bly small client base (latent print lab­o­ra­to­ries). Regardless, then end result is a patented instant AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) hit — at the EXACT moment Stokes walks into the room look­ing for results.

In the case of the mys­tery dead girl, trace evi­dence found on her recov­ered hand­bag is iden­ti­fied as being a fish scale. The team is pointed back to a per­son of inter­est based on the recov­ered fish scale, so they track him down at him job. This leads the team to the real death scene, a ware­house with pumps and tub­ing for fish tanks, and cocaine. (The dual pur­pose ware­house is also a dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter for the girl’s drug lord father.)

It is the­o­rized the girl mis­took pow­dered atropine that was lay­ing out for cocaine, snorted it, result­ing in a lethal bio­log­i­cal reac­tion. The employ­ees of the fish ware­house find her near death, and pan­icked her father will blame them devise a plan. They’ll save her by drain­ing her atropine laced blood, some­thing they had seen in a movie, then infuse her with their own atropine-free blood. So they use a series of aquar­ium tubes and pumps to pump blood out of her, and pump their own blood into her. It might have actu­ally worked, except one of the men’s blood was an incom­pat­i­ble type with the girl’s. This resulted in a fatal agglu­ti­na­tion of the blood, an immuno­log­i­cal response to the for­eign blood caus­ing rapid clump­ing of her blood and death. This also put to rest the bat­tle between the med­ical exam­iner and the crime lab serol­o­gist who were argu­ing over who con­t­a­m­i­nated the sam­ple, since it’s impos­si­ble for some­one to have two dif­fer­ent blood types — normally.

All in all this was an excel­lent episode, as far as the foren­sic sci­ence con­tained in it. Logical con­clu­sions from the evi­dence, fol­lowed by good inves­tiga­tive work.

The episode ends on a dark note. Everyone involved in the death of the girl (aunt, best girl­friend, club owner, fish tank ware­house peo­ple) is exe­cuted by hit­men sent by the girl’s drug lord father.